Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Digital Archives: Update

One of the reasons I began following this blog was because of its attentiveness to web resources and archives. This post sold me on the promise of digital history. This one introduced me to a favorite teaching tool, an on-line collection of presidential campaign ads. I return to this one whenever I need a photo. There is no substitute for touching and seeing "real" sources, or for physically sifting through piles of archival material (even - perhaps especially - the material that initially appears irrelevant). But resources like these are a boon to every historian with limited time or a limited a research budget.

Second, government libraries and archives. The National Archives and Records Administration has digitized over 125,000 historical documents. You can find them through NARA's searchable database or through the topical "galleries" (e.g., "Courts and Cases," "Federal Programs") on the website. NARA also offers a link to major historical documents, in case you want quick access to an image of the Bill of Rights or the Emancipation Proclamation. The Library of Congress has digitized a number of useful resources, including historical newspapers, documents from the Constitutional Convention, and evidence from famous trials. Most presidential libraries also have digitization projects. I've used the resources on the Harry S. Truman Library website and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library website. These online repositories are sometimes more limited, but usually offer speeches, photos, executive orders, and oral histories.

Third, historical societies and institutes. These archives often have online exhibits or "projects" (such as the one the Gilder Lehman Institute assembled on the Dred Scott decision) which hint at the material in the broader collections. Some, like the Massachusetts Historical Society, have put vast amounts of material online.

For more online archives specific to legal historians, check out the long list that the Triangle Legal History Seminar has assembled.

But I can't end on that note: a digital archives update is not complete without a reference to the great digitization debates.

The "millenarian prophecies" that historian Anthony Grafton described in his 2007 New Yorker piece continue. Whither paper books and brick-and-mortar libraries? I encourage interested readers to consult the Historical Society blog for ruminations on this topic.

Meanwhile, this era of trim budgets has given new urgency to ongoing discussions about which physical archives should be digitized and what information from the virtual realm (a.k.a. "born-digital" materials) ought to be preserved. (Should we devote resources to saving "tweets"? The Library of Congress thinks so.)

Check out this excellent post from the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School for a more thorough discussion of these issues.

2 comments:

Count me among the fans of digital archives. I think more needs to be digitized and made available. It's an exciting time to be alive. There are some excellent collections available on European websites, too. I'm a collector of links to these things, so thanks for the links! :) Here's another good one:

(Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection at Cornell):

http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/mayantislavery/

Cornell, Michigan, and Wisconsin all have nice digital collections with various contents in them.

Finally, totally random question: is there anything you (or anyone) would recommend to read on the process of actually doing history/historical research?

I could recommend a number of books about historiography and historical knowledge (e.g., Richard Evans' "In Defense of History"), but I am not as familiar with primers on the historical method. Hopefully others will comment. In the meantime, you might try doing a google search for syllabi. Many history graduate programs require theory/method courses, and you may be able to find their book lists online. You could also check out the "Additional Resources" tab on the AHA website.